San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center in the context of "Acre"

The War Memorial Opera House is an opera house in San Francisco, California, United States, located on the western side of Van Ness Avenue across from the west side/rear facade of the San Francisco City Hall.

It is part of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center. It has been the home of the San Francisco Opera since opening night in 1932.

San Francisco City Hall is the seat of government for the City and County of San Francisco, California. Re-opened in 1915 in its open space area in the city's Civic Center, it is a Beaux-Arts monument to the City Beautiful movement that epitomized the high-minded American Renaissance of the 1880s to 1917. The structure's dome is taller than that of the United States Capitol by 42 feet (13 m). The present building replaced an earlier City Hall that was destroyed during the 1906 earthquake, which was two blocks from the present one.

The principal architect was Arthur Brown, Jr., of Bakewell & Brown, whose attention to the finishing details extended to the doorknobs and the typeface to be used in signage. Brown also designed the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, Veterans Building, Temple Emanuel, Coit Tower and the Federal office building at 50 United Nations Plaza.

The Herbst Theatre is an auditorium in the War Memorial and Performing Arts Center in the Civic Center, San Francisco. The 928-seat hall hosts programs as diverse as City Arts & Lectures, SFJAZZ Center, and San Francisco Performances.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum and nonprofit organization located in San Francisco, California. SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art, and has built an internationally recognized collection with over 33,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts. The collection is displayed in 170,000 square feet (16,000 m) of exhibition space, making the museum one of the largest in the United States overall, and one of the largest in the world for modern and contemporary art. In 2024, SFMOMA was ranked 14th in the Washington Post's list of the best art museums in the U.S.

The museum was founded in 1935 with galleries in the Veterans Building in Civic Center. In 1995, the museum opened in its Mario Botta-designed home in the SoMa district. On May 14, 2016, following a three-year-long closure for a major expansion project by Snøhetta architects, the museum re-opened to the public with more than double the gallery space and almost six times as much public space as the previous building, allowing SFMOMA to showcase an expanding collection along with the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection of contemporary art.